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href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Militant-Farmers-Peasants-Fight-to-Bury-Filipino-Feudalism-With-Occupy-Movement--20170426-0042.html">http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Militant-Farmers-Peasants-Fight-to-Bury-Filipino-Feudalism-With-Occupy-Movement--20170426-0042.html</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">Militant Farmers, Peasants Fight to Bury
Filipino Feudalism With 'Occupy' Movement<br>
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<div id="reader-estimated-time">April 26, 2017<br>
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<p>In a bid to reassert their right to rural lands, farm
workers and peasants in the Philippines have directly
seized and occupied property claimed by one of the
archipelago's largest banks and main oligarch families,
the Aquino clan. The move is an escalation of a long
campaign to dismantle the unjust system of feudalism and
landlord rule inherited from the period of Spanish
colonialism.</p>
<p>Gathered in the hundreds and carrying signs with
slogans such as, "Land to the Tillers, Not to Their
Killers," members and supporters of the Kilusang
Magbubukid ng Pilipinas — a militant mass movement of
small farmers, landless peasants, farm workers, rural
youth and women — converged on a walled-off section of
Hacienda Luisita, a massive sugar plantation in the
Tarlac province controlled by the Cojuangco-Aquino
political dynasty..</p>
<p>As hundreds of police and private security guards
looked on, 700 farmers took turns destroying a concrete
wall enclosing large tracts of land that were illegally
sold to the Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation.
Eventually, a farm tractor was brought in to pull
sections of the wall down. While the farmers dispersed
that afternoon, they swore to return and undertake the
collective cultivation of the land.</p>
<p>For the farmers, the walled-off enclosure represents
the broken promise of land reform that the Philippine
rural poor have been fighting for decades to win in the
face of illegal and semi-legal methods of dispossession
and open robbery by ruling elite families.</p>
<p>“Kadamay expresses its full support for the
#OccupyLuisita movement as it echoes our own call for
the government to own up to its sins and finally begin
to give to people what is due them,” Kadamay chair
Gloria Arellano said, noting that the land remains
abandoned “simply because the landlords and the
government hold on to their spoils rather than fulfill
their duties to the people. Just like the idle housing
units, the ruling class would rather see homes and land
go unused rather than be owned or made productive by the
broad masses of the Filipino people.”</p>
<p>The mass action, given the hashtag #OccupyLuisita by
the peasant movement, recalled the recent <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Neglected-and-Shamed-Filipino-Poor-Seize-and-Redistribute-Homes-Demand-Jobs-20170419-0031.html">successful
takeover and redistribution</a> of government housing
undertaken by allied urban group Kadamay in Bulacan
province, called #OccupyBulacan.</p>
<p>The destruction of the wall and reclamation of the land
marks the next step in a renewed nationwide campaign
aimed at genuine land reform, including the free
distribution of land and equipment.</p>
<p>“We are taking back what is ours. We are taking back
control of the lands that the Cojuangco-Aquinos have
illegally usurped for more than half a century,” said
Renato Mendoza, secretary general of the Peasant
Alliance of Hacienda Luisita, in a statement by KMP.</p>
<p>The hacienda system continues to linger in the
Philippines as a remnant of Spanish colonial rule, where
families with strong connections to international
capitalist markets and overseas interests continue to
exploit farm workers in feudal or semi-feudal conditions
on vast estates where they enjoy near-monopoly control.</p>
<p>In addition to claiming ownership of Hacienda Luisita,
the Cojuangco-Aquino dynasty also controls major
financial institutions such as the Bank of Commerce and
are highly visible in entertainment and in politics on
every level, in addition to having ruled the country on
various occasions, most recently under the 2010-2016
administration of former President Benigno “Noynoy”
Aquino III.</p>
<p>In fact, the Cojuangco-Aquino family itself spearheaded
past failed attempts at land reform. In 1988, Noynoy's
mother and former President Corazon Aquino put forward
the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, which set the
terms for the redistribution of public and private
agricultural land to poor farm workers and peasants.</p>
<p>Since then, hundreds of fighters and advocates for
rural rights have been killed in paramilitary violence
while estates like Hacienda Luisita — which Aquino
inherited from her father, “Don Pepe” Jose Cojuangco —
were exempted from the reform law and shielded by
successive governments from redistribution through a
complex system of laws that allowed for rampant illegal
and semi-legal land grabs.</p>
<p>Rather than the hacienda being redistributed to the
peasants, thousands of hectares were simply kept by the
family while other sections were partitioned into
non-agricultural illegal conversions with titles “sold”
to such entities as Luisita Golf and Country Club,
Luisita Realty Corporation and Las Haciendas
Subdivisions. According to Agrarian Reform Secretary
Rafael Mariano, the land was sold to “influential
personalities and local politicians.”</p>
<p>Now, as agrarian reform is a condition of the <a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Philippines-Duterte-Ends-Peace-Talks-with-Maoist-Rebels-20170205-0005.html">peace
process</a> between the government of President
Rodrigo Duterte and the National Democratic Front of the
Philippines, social movements across the archipelago
plan on ensuring that this time around, the process is
truly implemented.</p>
<p>“There is no better time for the Filipino youth and
students to immerse and integrate with the peasants to
forward the resounding call for genuine agrarian reform
and create a powerful wave of anti-feudal mass movements
throughout the country,” said national youth group
Anakbayan in a statement released Wednesday, calling for
youth to prepare to join rural workers in the wave of
occupations envisioned for the coming months.</p>
<p>In the eyes of rural leaders, there can never be a
turning back of the clock in regards to their right to
stake a legitimate claim to land they break their backs
working on a daily basis.</p>
<p>“Farmers can only rely on our collective strength,”
said KMP chairperson Joseph Canlas. “Assertion of our
right to the land is the way to proceed with actual land
distribution.”</p>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
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San Francisco, CA 94110
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